Friday, March 16, 2012

email vs snail mail

Email is great. You need to set a date, ask a question, opine on some esoteric subject--and your friends grab their agendas, answer, agree, or disagree.
Communication happens fast and at your schedule. (Big plus for myself who doesn't like to be interrupted.) If you want to share some detail immediately and it's 5 a.m. where your friend lives, go ahead, type an email. Your friend will read it at her convenience and you can read her reply at your convenience.

Snail mail isn't as fast or hot off the tongue, but it can be more quirky, personal, and fun. Yesterday I got a letter from a friend on this lovely stationary decorated with bits of curved ribbon.

She bought it at a church fair years ago where it caught her eye because it reminded her of stationary sold in Budapest.
I've received snail mail on handmade, organic, coloured, scratchy, and velvety paper. Postcards and cards count too. They don't have to be artsy. Kitsch has its own aesthetic. Pages come adorned with drawings, pasted wine labels, bits of tissue paper collage, coffee circles.
R and I used to live in cities several hours apart. We wrote letters. Now we share a house.
Here's a letter from my friend in Copenhagen: a poem 106 lines / 56 cm / 22" long. I've kept it in the scroll shape it was sent. It's called "Through the Looking Glasses, Markly" because his name is Mark and mine is...

Snail mail means that the person thought of you for that bit longer that it took to find material to write on, an envelope, a stamp.
Remember stamps?

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Five Roses, a novel

Alice Zorn’s new novel Five Roses weaves incantatory magic. The warp of this novel is Zorn’s elegant prose style and the weft is her compassionate attention to the colourful interior lives of her characters as they untangle various losses. Five Roses is an arresting artwork, a compulsive read, and a moving, complex, meditation on what it is to form a good-enough life from the remnants of hard memories. A beautiful, beautiful book. (Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things)

Alice Zorn is a writer of incredible sensitivity and precision, and this haunting, tender novel is her finest work yet. Five Roses weaves together the delicate dance of friendship, the intensity of love, and the aftermath of loss in a story as vivid and remarkable as life itself. Its people and places will linger with you long after you have put it down. (Saleema Nawaz, author of Bone and Bread)

Arrhythmia, a novel

“An utterly compelling story written with a clear, cold eye. Zorn’s women navigate betrayal by holding filaments of family and friendship so tenuous you never know which lifeline will snap.” Kathleen Winter

Ruins & Relics, short fiction

"I love the range of these stories, the sense of complete worlds, the way the author quietly and remorselessly closes in on her characters. There is a crack in everything, and Alice Zorn finds it." Joan Thomas